Educational Science

The first SpaceX astronauts are back on Earth

Update 2:50 pm EDT: Everything went as planned, with SpaceX and NASA reporting a successful splashdown. The astronauts radioed in from inside the capsule that they were feeling good. A recovery team has begun the process of extracting the crew from the capsule, while the astronauts run some final checks....

Common colds train the immune system to recognize COVID-19

Previous infections with common cold viruses can train the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a new study. The study, published Aug. 4 in the journal Science, found that immune cells known as T cells that recognize common cold coronaviruses also recognize specific sites...

If you saw a feathered, two-footed critter on the lawn, what would you tell people you saw? A robin? A blackbird? How about a dinosaur? From a taxonomist's perspective, you couldn't go wrong with dinosaur. According to taxonomy, the discipline that assigns official scientific names to all known organisms, all...

Why is space a vacuum?

Space is an almost perfect vacuum, full of cosmic voids. And in short, gravity is to blame. But to really understand the vacuum of our universe, we have to take a moment to understand what a vacuum really is — and what it's not. So, what is a vacuum, and...

Fall could bring rare, paralyzing illness in children, CDC warns

As if the COVID-19 pandemic weren't bad enough, health officials say we're due for an outbreak of a rare, polio-like illness in children this fall. Cases of this disease, known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), spiked late in the summer and fall of 2014, 2016 and 2018, and officials expect...

We may finally know what life on Earth breathed before there was oxygen

Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet. In Chile's Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a...

Earth's new minimoon might be a rocket humans launched into space in the 1960s

Earth is getting a small new moon, but it might have been made by people. Astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona first detected the object back in February as a flash of light darting across space. BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon...

4 die from drinking tainted hand sanitizer, CDC reports

At least four people in the U.S. have died after drinking tainted hand sanitizer, and about a dozen more have experienced serious health effects including vision loss, according to a new report. The report follows warnings from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about dozens of hand sanitizer products found...

Two Canadian ice caps have completely vanished from the Arctic, NASA imagery shows

On frosty Ellesmere Island, where Arctic Canada butts up against the northwestern edge of Greenland, two once-enormous ice caps have completely vanished, new NASA imagery shows. It's no mystery where the caps, known as the St. Patrick Bay ice caps, went. Like many glacial features in the Arctic — which...

Trump administration plans to distribute 100 million rapid COVID-19 tests to states

The Trump administration has announced a plan to distribute millions of rapid COVID-19 tests to states, with a focus on using the tests to reopen schools. On Monday (Sept. 28), President Donald Trump said in a news conference that the federal government would soon begin deploying 150 million rapid COVID-19...